Megan Abbott - The Fever

He tried to steady her, feeling her cold cheek pressed into his shoulder, a musky smell coming from her.

“Sheila,” his dad was saying, more firmly now.

“Oh, Tom,” she said, whirling around. “I need to tell you about Deenie.”

“What about Deenie?” Eli thought he heard a hitch in his father’s voice.

“They want us to believe they’re helping our girls. They’re killing our girls. It’s a kind of murder. A careless murder.”

“Sheila, why don’t you come inside?” his dad said in that calm-down voice that used to drive his mom crazy. “Let’s sit down and—”

“I can’t do that, Tom,” she said, her voice turning into a moan. “Our girls. I remember when I took Lise and Deenie shopping for their first bras. I remember showing them how to adjust the training straps. Those little pink ribbons.”

“Sheila, I—”

“Who would ever have thought in a few years we’d be poisoning them?”

His dad was saying something, but Eli wasn’t listening, couldn’t stop looking at her, her mouth like a slash.

As if sensing his stare, she turned to Eli again.

“The things we do to our girls because of you.”

Eli felt his hands wet on his bike handles.

“Me?”

Something was turning in her face, like a Halloween mask from the inside.

“The dangers our girls suffer at your hands,” she said. “We know and we’ll do anything to protect them. To inoculate them. Anything .”

“Sheila, have you slept at all?” His dad put his arm on Eli’s shoulder, gave him a look. “Let’s get you some coffee and—”

She shook her head, eyes pink and large and trained on Eli.

“No one made you shoot yourself full of poison,” she said, voice rising high.

She pointed her finger at Eli, below his waist.

“All of you,” she said, eyes now on Eli’s dad. “Spreading your semen anywhere you want. That’s the poison.”

“Sheila, Sheila…”

“Don’t say I didn’t do what I could.” She turned and started walking away. “I hope it’s not too late.”

It had been a night of blurry, jumbled sleep. Deenie woke with a vague memory of dreaming she was at the Pizza House, standing in front of the creaking dough machine, Sean Lurie coming out slowly from behind the ovens, looking at her, head cocked, grin crooked.

What? she’d said. What is it?

It’s you , he said, standing in front of the blazing oven.

And she’d stepped back from the machine suddenly, the airy dough passing between her hands, soft like a bird breast.

It fell to the bleached floor, flour atomizing up.

Hands slick with oil, and Sean’s eyes on them. On her hands.

And she looking down at them, seeing them glazed not with oil but with green sludge, the green glowing, the lights flickering off.

Deenie stood at the kitchen island, phone in hand.

Mom wont let me go to school tday, Gabby’s text read. Sorry, DD.

After everything Gabby had been through, she was still worried about Deenie having to navigate the day without her. Because these were things they maneuvered together—school, divorces, faraway parents who wanted things. Boys.

The side door slammed and her dad came into the kitchen, shoving the morning paper into his book bag.

Something in the heave of morning air made her remember.

“Dad,” she said, “did you hear something earlier? A noise.”

Vaguely, she remembered looking out her window, expecting a barn owl screeching.

He turned toward the coffeepot.

“Mrs. Daniels came by this morning,” he said. “She couldn’t stay long, but Lise is doing okay. No change, but nothing’s happened.”

“Why didn’t you wake me up?”

“There wasn’t time,” he said, lifting his cup to his face. “She couldn’t stay. She had to go back.”

“But can we go over there now?”

“No,” he said, quickly.

Deenie looked at him, the way he held his coffee cup over his mouth when he spoke.

“I mean,” he added, “we’ll see.”

Outside, it was bitter cold, the sky onion white.

Eli came with them on the drive to school, which never happened.

Riding together, it felt like long ago, fighting in the backseat until Dad would have to stop the car and make one of them sit up front.

She felt a wave of nostalgia, even for the times he kicked her and tore holes in her tights with his skates.

“Eli Nash, skipping practice. I bet you broke Coach Haller’s heart,” Deenie said, looking at her brother in the backseat, legs astride, the taped knob white with baby powder, like Wayne Gretzky’s. But he wouldn’t look at her.

“I bet they didn’t even have practice without you,” she tried again. “I bet they all took their helmets off in your honor. I bet they hung black streamers over the rink and cried.”

“I overslept,” he said, facing the window. He didn’t look annoyed. He didn’t even seem to be listening to her.

She waited a moment, for something, then turned back around. The sky looked so lonely.

The car turned, and there was the lake.

“Deenie,” her dad said, so suddenly his voice startled her, “Lise and Gabby haven’t been in the lake lately, have they?”

He regretted it the moment he said it, and a hundred times more when he saw her body stiffen.

Wrung out from scant sleep, he wasn’t sure his mind was quite his own. All of Sheila’s ravings, he hadn’t quite pieced them together, but he could guess. It had something to do with vaccinations, a predatory attorney, the teeming Internet. She needed an explanation, badly, and he couldn’t blame her.

Driving, though, he couldn’t shake the feeling of something, some idea.

Then his eyes had landed on the lake, its impossible phosphorescence, even in the bitter cold, still half frozen over, the algae beneath like a sneaking promise. Remembering Georgia, her mouth ringed black that night years ago. She said she’d dreamed she put her own fingers down her throat, all the way down, and felt something like the soft lake floor there, mossy and wet and tainted.

She was never the same after that, he’d decided. Though he also knew that wasn’t true. She hadn’t been the same before that. No one was ever the same, except him.

So, his head still muddled, he’d found himself asking Deenie that ridiculous question about the lake, no better than Sheila’s speculations.

He could see her whole body seize up.

“We’re not allowed in the lake,” she replied, which wasn’t really an answer. “Why are you asking me that?”

“No reason,” he said. “I guess I’m just getting ready for today’s rumors.”

“Sometimes kids go in anyway,” Eli said from the backseat. “I’ve seen it.”

Deenie turned around to face him. “Like you, you mean. You and me.”

“What?”

“We used to go in it, before. We used to swim in it, remember?”

“That’s right,” Tom said. “We used to take you.”

When they were little, long before the boy drowned. Tom had a memory of pushing the corner of a towel in Eli’s ear, hoping it wouldn’t be another ear infection, that milky white drip down his neck. Why did he ever let them in that lake, even then?

He could hear Eli twisting his stick left and right. “But something happened to it. It doesn’t even seem like the same lake. And it smells like the bottom of the funkiest pair of skates in the locker room.”

“You mean yours?” Deenie said, like they were ten and twelve again, except there was a roughness in their voices Tom didn’t like.

And Deenie’s chin was shaking.

Tom could see it shaking.

He found himself watching it with exaggerated closeness, until she noticed him and stared back, her face locking into stillness.